Special to the Kalamazoo Gazette / Jerry CampbellOil shows clearly in the water Thursday as it heads down the Kalamazoo River through the Ceresco Dam, located between Marshall and Battle Creek. Red tankers, manned by cleanup crews, are poised nearby.

BATTLE CREEK — Nearly a week after one of the largest oil spills in Midwest history, questions remain about exactly when the crude started spewing into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River.

Call logs from Marshall-area fire departments that were obtained by the Kalamazoo Gazette show that residents were reporting a bad smell nearly 12 hours before federal records say the oil spill was officially discovered.

The timing is important because it means that oil could have been pouring into Talmadge Creek near Marshall for hours before any cleanup efforts were mobilized.

The federal government now estimates that more than 1 million gallons of oil spilled into the creek, flowing downstream toward Kalamazoo.

While officials maintain that the spread of the spill has not breached the Morrow Dam in Comstock Township — and will likely never reach Lake Michigan — a huge cleanup effort remains before them upstream, especially in Calhoun County.

A PUBLIC MEETING

The EPA will hold a community meeting at Marshall High School, at 701 North Marshall Ave. in Marshall, at 7 p.m. on Monday to allow residents to ask questions of local, state and federal officials about the oil spill and the ongoing response.

Officials estimate that the cleanup will take months and U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, D-Battle Creek, said at a press conference on Saturday that the cleanup would likely cost “tens of millions of dollars,” the first time an official has estimated a dollar figure for the remediation.

According to an incident description report from the National Response Center, the federal government’s initial point of contact for oil, biological and chemical discharges, Enbridge Inc. discovered the oil discharge at 9:45 a.m. on Monday.

But according to the call logs from Marshall area fire departments, residents were reporting the smell of natural gas nearly 12 hours before Edmonton, Alberta-based Enbridge says it discovered the spill.

At 9:25 p.m. on Sunday, a call to the city of Marshall Fire Department indicating a “bad smell of natural gas” was made, according to one of the reports. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says on its Web site that fresh crude smells like gas.

Another call to the Marshall Township Fire Department at 9:49 p.m. indicated the same smell coming from the area of the spill on 15 Mile Road in Marshall Township. First responders were dispatched to the area.

A call to the city of Marshall Fire Department at 11:11 a.m. on Monday indicating that “the entire downtown smells like natural gas.”

Enbridge maintained all last week that the spill occurred on Monday, with the company’s vice president for pipelines and liquids, Steve Wuori, saying on Thursday that it would “not be fruitful at this time” to go into when exactly the spill occurred.

Schauer said that he doesn’t know for sure when the leak began, but the call logs raise significant questions that need to be addressed.

“If that’s the case, than it’s beyond alarming,” Schauer said of the possibility that oil was spewing from the pipe on Sunday night.

The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation to determine how the spill occurred, with the agency’s investigator in charge for the spill, Matt Nicholson, saying Friday that the call logs would be part of the investigation into exactly when the spill happened.

Whatever time the spill actually started, Enbridge was required under federal law to immediately report it to the federal government. The company reported the spill at 1:33 p.m., nearly four hours after it maintains it discovered the spill.

Patrick Daniel, Enbridge president and chief executive officer, said on Saturday that his company’s response was timely, adding that they had to determine an estimate of how much oil spilled before making the call to the National Response Center.

“We met the requirements,” he said.

Schauer disagrees.

“Even if this didn’t occur until Monday, the company was still negligent in not reporting it until 1:33 p.m.” Schauer said. “Precious time was wasted. At least three hours and 48 minutes was lost. They were very slow to respond.”

Schauer, a member of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials, introduced legislation in the House last week that would limit the time a company has to report an incident to the National Response Center and increase fines for failure to notify the NRC within that time limit.

Current law states that companies must report an incident “immediately,” which is defined as the “earliest practicable moment.” Schauer’s bill would retain the “immediate” requirement, but create an outside cap of one hour after the discovery of a leak.

Companies that fail to notify immediately or exceed the one-hour requirement would face a penalty of $250,000, up from the previous $100,000, and penalties would increase to $2.5 million for companies having multiple related violations.

Schauer also said on Saturday that the subcommittee would be holding formal hearings on the spill in September “to connect the dots.” Subcommittee members will visit the area of the spill in late August to survey the damage and gather information, he said.

“We need to know what they knew and when they knew it,” Schauer said of Enbridge. “We need to get to the bottom of what happened so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, is a co-sponsor of Schauer’s bill.

Upton, also at the press conference Saturday, praised the efforts of local, state and federal agencies that responded to the spill over the past several days.

“It’s a remarkable change from the beginning,” he said. “But there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Another perspectiveOn Friday, Gov. Jennifer Granholm said she also saw a significant improvement over the past few days in terms of the level of response to the spill from government and company officials. But that wasn’t that case early in the week, as Granholm hammered both the company and the EPA for the initial response to the spill, calling it “anemic,” on Wednesday.

The EPA took control over the containment and cleanup operation on Wednesday night, and since then, Granholm and several federal officials — including U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — have said the response has been markedly better.

On Wednesday, of the 45,000 feet of oil collection boom available at the time, only about 14,000 feet had been deployed and Enbridge’s work force was about 200 company and contract employees. As of Saturday afternoon, the amount of boom on the river was about 60,000 feet at 27 sites, from the intersection of Talmadge Creek downstream to Morrow Lake in Comstock Township.

Enbridge said it now has nearly 700 workers on the river working around the clock in 12-hour shifts to contain the oil, collect it and suck it up to be hauled to a treatment area.

“Since the EPA took over, things have gone well,” Schauer said. “Enbridge should have been pushed aside from Day 1.”

From the companyFor his part, Enbridge President and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Daniel was apologetic for his company’s oil spill from the beginning, saying on Friday that it “certainly tarnished the image of the company.”

Special to the Kalamazoo Gazette / Jerry CampbellOil recovery booms can be seen Thursday in a section of the Kalamazoo River from the Marshall area to Galesburg, adjacent to the athletic practice fields at Galesburg-Augusta High School.

On Saturday, Daniel pledged to “do whatever it takes to return the river to the state it was prior to the spill.”

For the first time, on Saturday, EPA and NTSB officials said they were able to get a look at the section of pipe that burst. The rupture was located at the top of the 30-inch underground pipe, said Mark Durno, the EPA’s deputy on-scene coordinator for the spill. No additional oil seems to be leaking from it, he said.

Officials said they hope to excavate a 40-foot section of the pipe sometime today or early on Monday, before it’s cut out and shipped to the NTSB’s lab in Washington, D.C., for analysis.

The pipe, built in 1969, carries about 8 million gallons of oil per day from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ontario.

Also on Saturday, Durno said there is virtually no oil sheen in the last third of the affected area of the river, from about Ft. Custer State Recreation Area to Morrow Lake. In areas upstream, the level of oil on the water has dissipated significantly, he said.

Still, Durno added, “the long-term remediation and air monitoring will likely last for several months, of not years.”

No sheen downstreamFor several days last week, officials in Kalamazoo County — including the city of Kalamazoo — wondered if the oil spill that was killing wildlife and causing a stench over many communities in Calhoun County would reach downstream.

Save some reports of oil sheen in the communities of Augusta and Galesburg, the heaviest of the oil never made it into the county.

The state told residents not to use river water for irrigation or livestock and booms were placed in Morrow Lake just before Morrow Dam as a precaution.

The county declared a state of emergency on Tuesday afternoon, warning people not to enter the river for any purposes and to avoid spending time in the immediate areas around the river.

In the city of Kalamazoo, public services officials shut down on Tuesday morning a well field intake line close to Morrow Lake. The line, which accounts for 10 percent of the city’s water supply, was still shut down Saturday. The city says that the water supply is not at risk and there is plenty of capacity, in spite of the shutdown.

The Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety also pulled out and made ready its Hazmat suits and some boom it has on hand.

“We want to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” City Manager Kenneth Collard said on Friday. “We understood that this could have been a big issue for us. It turns out that it doesn’t look like it’s going to be.”